Online advertising, where advertising content is displayed to a user alongside published editorial content, is now widely used. Conventional online advertising schemes often do not display content that is relevant to the material the user is reading, and generally add little value to the host website. The appearance of advertising on a website thus can significantly degrade the user experience. This in turn presents challenges to the web publisher and the web user, both of whom are interested in attracting and holding the user's attention.
Banner advertising on a publisher's website is based on a traditional approach to advertising, and is often seen by the user as distracting. The advertising content is very often unrelated to the editorial content the user is reading. Studies have shown that a user encountering a banner actually clicks on the banner to investigate its content less than 1% of the time. Banner advertisements are thus largely ineffective in driving web users to the advertiser's website, and accordingly are not likely to provide sustainable revenue for the publisher hosting the advertising. Furthermore, in those few instances where users become interested in the advertising content, they are forced to exit the publisher's website in order to view that content. Once the users exit, the user experience is outside the control of the publisher.
In order to attract a user's attention more effectively, an advertiser may contract with a third party providing keyword-based matching with editorial content. Similarly, a web publisher may have contextual advertising links served to its website, based on generic keyword matching against the editorial content. While this approach partially addresses the problem of serving links to relevant advertising content, it still requires the user to exit the publisher's website in order to view the advertising content. Furthermore, the web advertiser relationship is generally owned by the contextual advertising service provider, not the web publisher. Thus, the publisher again has little influence on user experience when users are directed away from the publisher website to the advertising via the link. Under such circumstances there is little ability for the publisher to create a visually seamless user experience.
An advertiser may engage a publisher to build a “microsite” for the advertiser within the publisher's website. However, this requires the publisher to commit resources to developing, maintaining and marketing the advertiser's microsite. Because advertising is dynamic and up to the moment, the content of the microsite continually changes. Therefore the publisher must devote substantial resources to simply keeping the advertiser's microsite current. Under this arrangement, the advertiser has little or no control over how the publisher promotes the microsite to drive traffic thereto. In order to secure more prominence on a publisher site, an advertiser may instead sponsor a portion of the publisher's website. This approach provides sustainable revenue for the publisher, but, much like banner advertising, provides no logical relationship between the advertising content and the publisher's editorial content. Therefore, this approach does not meet the advertiser's objective, which is to reach users that are receptive to the advertiser's content and message.
Web users generally enter a publisher's website to seek information about a particular topic. Users will therefore resist advertisements or text links that take them outside of the publisher's website and onto a page where they are required to search for potentially relevant content. On the other hand, users will investigate both advertising content and editorial content, provided that both are relevant to their topic of choice and they are not required to exit the site to find desired content. Thus, while systems for linking editorial content to advertiser content exist, improvement to those systems is desired.